Mark Elphinstone's query into his secret vices had worried him. Behind a certain mockery he had felt authentic criticism of his Y.M.C.A.ish sobriety and industry. It keyed far back to Ora's frequent complaints about his unimaginative bossiness, Miss Absolom's warning about priggishness, and the disgust of the senior bell-boy at the Fandango when he had refused to rob the inn of its whisky profits. He worried. Was he a prig? He must do something about it. So, on his next off evening after Elphinstone's visit, he had gone out, not with Alec Monlux but with the kittenish reservation-clerk, and with earnest determination had become thoroughly boiled on cocktails and Bourbon, and had gone to her home with a lady of 'uncertain reputation', which means that her reputation was extremely certain. He felt horrible, all next day.
'Hell, I guess I just can't be a sport, any more than I can be an imaginative, poetical cuss like Ora,' he groaned, amid the fumes that filled his head and the world. 'I guess I'll just have to go on being a grind.'
There is no sadder, less sympathetic character than a young man who is so inhibited that he cannot enjoy going to the dogs and thus become dramatic. But so it was, though it is still related in hotel circles that on the day the Pierre Ronsard closed for ever, amid cracking two-by-fours and falling plaster, Myron danced a hornpipe through the lobby, accompanied by the housekeeper, a venerable and Presbyterian lady, and afterward kissed her soundly and induced her to drink a gin rickey, and to tie a sign 'Just married' on the suitcase of Alec Monlux, who was off to an hotel in Kansas City. What is not common knowledge is that next day, with the house-wreckers already at work on the roof of the Pierre Ronsard, Myron returned to it and, sitting on a very little box in front of a very big box, finished up the final report for the Elphinstone central office of the chief accountant, who had gone home the day before, and that he showed his inescapable unromanticism by whistling over the forms and looking altogether more cheerful than when he had danced through the lobby with ledger leaves in his hair.
Just before the Pierre Ronsard closed, Myron had received a note from Ora, and with it a copy of that popular wood-pulp magazine the Yankee Doodle, containing Ora's first considerable work of fiction, a long short story, or perhaps it was a short long story, entitled 'Navajo Moon'. It dealt with the wanton adventures of Heck O'Gorra who was, it seemed, a homicidal but benevolent and witty cow-puncher resident upon a ranch in or near Arizona. Though heroic, Heck was a man of doubtful habits, felt Myron. He was given to drinking, playing red dog, knocking out the teeth of officers of the Law, and on all occasions using such foul language as 'Why, you beetle-headed, flap-eared cur', which Ora had got out of Shakespeare, 'You contemptible scoundrel', apparently a dreadful objurgation, West of the Mississippi, and 'Why, you unfortunate accident, I'll pound your polyglot--I'll make your ears and chin-whiskers change places--I'll drive your medulla oblongata right through your saddle-horn, you hornswoggling, barn-burning orphan-robber you!' But never were the pages of the Yankee Doodle stained with such horrifying words as Hell or Damn or Bastard. The writers spelled it 'H--l', so that none of the travelling-men, mechanics, trainmen, and osteopaths who read it could guess what the naughty word was, and be thus led on down the path to H--l.
'Navajo Moon' was jammed with Local Colour; with words like riata and arroyo and mesa and Judas tree and greaser and manzanita and chuck-wagon, and with the liveliest description of heat-shimmering mountains and jolly times around the banjo in the bunk-house. There was also a real Western gal, Heck O'Gorra's gal, who wore a short, fringed doeskin skirt, embroidered with dyed porcupine quills, and a silver-mounted ·44 six-gun. She was all-fired Western. She was a breath from the boundless sage. She was also a breath from the Arizona glaciers, and she considered Easterners lousy--though, in 1904, and in Yankee Doodle, Ora had not used so obscene a word as 'lousy', but translated it as 'stuck-up tenderfeet that don't know a prairie dog from a by jiminy stem-winder'.
Myron wondered. It seemed to him a considerable feat, for he knew Ora had never been west of Poughkeepsie. He did wish, though, that Ora, with his high-class, refined education--always reading poetry, and cultured British novelists like Mrs. Humphry Ward--would adopt more elegant themes, like Harvard men on the Riviera, or Yale men encountering human magnolia blossoms upon Southern plantations. His congratulatory letter to Ora he ended with, 'Some time you must see more of the hotels. Some of the old-timers among the hotel-men could give you a lot of material about quaint characters among guests, etc., that would sure make a best-seller.'
Not till he had read 'Navajo Moon' a second time did Myron realize that it was uncomfortably flippant about morals, and that the character of the raw young tavern-keeper was probably intended for a portrait of himself.
He decided then not to go home for his vacation, between October 10th, when the Pierre Ronsard would close, and November 15th, when he was due at Tippecanoe Lodge.
He was eager to see his mother, but the picture of his father's frowziness, Ora's jeering, the chilliness of Julia and Herbert and Trumbull Lambkin, was forbidding. It is only in fiction that busy young men far from home spend much time in longing to view the dear, bright, vacant faces of childhood friends and every loved spot that their infancy knew.
But next spring he would have his mother come to New York, for her first journey there, and show her the town. (Later, he actually did it!)
His free month he spent in another pilgrimage to famous hotels, zigzagging north and south, to Toledo, Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Richmond. Now that he was a real assistant manager and less humble, he came to know many hotel-men; Middlewesterners and Southerners, gayer and friendlier than the sound but over-cautious managers of New England, and readier to experiment with every innovation, from room-telephones to ten-story towers for towns of fifty thousand. He was eager as he crossed the prairies and came to the booming towns and bustling inns. Many old and famous hotels he saw, too. Alas, that most of the famous establishments which then seemed to him indestructible monuments were to be torn down before 1930, or, far worse, be degraded into lodging-houses, like a portly proud old gentleman in filthy linen! The competition of future forty-story titans was as unimaginable to the Myron of 1904, who pleasantly believed that he had seen the 'utmost in modern hotel construction', as is to the hotel-man of 1933 the sort of hotels that will rule in 1962--whether they shall be of 150 stories and 10,000 rooms or, in a smashed civilization, be again squat and filthy inns.